No one but me ever put a hand on me to feel that baby. No one wanted to put his ear against it and listen…You shouldn’t have a baby if there’s no one who wants to feel it kick or listen to it move.
JOHN IRVINGLife,” Garp wrote, “is sadly not structured like a good old-fashioned novel. Instead an end occurs when those who are meant to peter out have petered out. All that is left is memory. But even a nihilist has memory.
More John Irving Quotes
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Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
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The former stewardess glared at her ex-pilot husband as if he had been speaking, and thinking, in the absence of sufficient oxygen.
JOHN IRVING -
but good friends are nothing to each other if they are not supportive.
JOHN IRVING -
I’ve always been slow but I’m even slower now. I’m more into the waiting, or I guess I’m more patient about the waiting.
JOHN IRVING -
Nearly everything seems a letdown after a writer has finished writing something.
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Rituals are comforting; rituals combat loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
…I suddenly realized what small towns are. They are places where you grow up with the peculiar-you live next door to the strange and the unlikely for so long that everything and everyone become commonplace.
JOHN IRVING -
The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he’d not yet seen.
JOHN IRVING -
It’s not right to hurt or deceive someone who’s already been hurt and deceived.
JOHN IRVING -
Self-hatred is worse than loneliness.
JOHN IRVING -
I always thought that you could do worse than find yourself dying in the company of a devoted former student.
JOHN IRVING -
Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.
JOHN IRVING -
What a phrase that is: ‘that explains everything!’ I know better than to think anything ‘explains everything’ today.
JOHN IRVING -
So, I don’t work in terms of real time. I don’t work in a timely fashion.
JOHN IRVING -
Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else’s religion practiced on us.
JOHN IRVING